Food, Place, Intimacy: A Conversation with Bryan Washington
“The places we spend a lot of time in continually change in the same way that we change, even though it may not necessarily be in the same direction”
Family Meal is your third work of fiction, but for any of our readers who haven’t read your work, could you tell us a little bit more about your journey as a writer thus far?
Of course, so my first book was Lot, which was a collection of short stories, or could think of it as like a story cycle. My second book and my first published novel was Memorial, and in many ways, it was about two queer men who were trying to figure out what it means to be okay, and one of their mothers helps them along in that particular journey. Family Meal, my second novel and my third book, is about grief, friendship, ghosts, and the ways in which family can come together and dissolve, and the many different forms family can take.
And did you do any writing before you were published?
Yes, I did. I would freelance a good deal. I always had fiction in mind as a tertiary goal, but I worked a number of other gigs in the midst of that and, frankly, during the first and second and third book. So, I’ve had a lot of fun doing other things alongside the writing.
And specifically in terms of Family Meal, what is the story behind the story? Where did your inspiration for the narrative come from?
So, I’m a reader before I’m a writer, first and foremost. So, if there was an iteration of Family Meal that had already been written, I would not do it because it’s too much work. And , you know, I’d rather be reading! But there were questions about queer friendship and found family, and questions about community and home that were percolating for me, and it felt interesting to see if I could find a way to imbue that into a narrative with the locales being places that I hold dear. I wanted to see the ways in which folks are able to change, or the ways in which folks are changed by way of the context that they find themselves in, and how that impacts any relationship, platonic or romantic. These are questions that are fascinating to me because they don’t have static answers; they’re different for everyone, but they remain questions over the course of your life. So that’s always really exciting for me when I’m thinking through, ‘Okay, what project do I want to work on?’, because the question that doesn’t have an answer is a question that is also full of possibility. And that was really exciting.
Place plays a big role in Family Meal, particularly Houston. In fact, I read somewhere that you have been described not as a writer from Houston, but as a writer of Houston. I love that idea and I wanted to ask what your own experience with the city is and what role you wanted it to play in Family Meal?
So, I wasn’t born in Houston, but I grew up in Houston and it’s the city I’ve lived in the longest. It’s the city I’ve spent time in, regardless of wherever else I was, like Los Angeles or Osaka. In Family Meal, there’s a particular neighbourhood in Houston called Montrose, which is lauded as the city’s queer neighbourhood. It’s where there are a number of queer owned businesses, or businesses that are front facing as queer-owned, such as nightclubs, bars, and social services; however, the core community in the greater Houston area has changed a good deal over the course of the last decade, and it’s been accelerated and exacerbated over the course of the last four or five years. Much of that comes from money, and much of that comes from the ways in which folks outside of Montrose have seen its value. So, its values have shifted in that it’s pushed a lot of the folks who made it a home or a solace outside of it, as though they’re no longer explicitly, or in most cases, implicitly, able to see themselves inside that space. And that’s really horrible to me. It’s terrifying and it felt interesting to see if I could map the arc of a number of different characters in that particular neighbourhood as it changed over time, in line with their own emotional arc as they figure out themselves, what they want to be , and how they conceive of the different forms of pleasure. I was also thinking about the tension that occurs between the ways in which a physical place can change and the less tangible ways in which a character or a person can change. It feels as though that’s something that is relevant to each of us in the way that the places we spend a lot of time in continually change in the same way that we change, even though it may not necessarily be in the same direction.
I also read that there are no ‘zoning laws’ in Houston, but coming from the UK, I don’t know what that means in practise - could you explain how that affects the dynamic of the city?
Well, much is made of the lack of zoning in Houston. A shorthand for it is that you can have a church and a children’s aftercare centre and a bail bonds shop and a sex shop and a smoke shop and a gas station all on the same strip. It varies from county to county – in some counties, it’s more exacerbated than others. I think one of the reasons why people from outside of Houston care about this is the diversity of the city. By way of that diversity, you have a lot of businesses and a lot of folks; a lot of communities that – solely by way of them being in close proximity to one another – are in the same space. And that’s just not true for much of the US. Although, there are certainly other major cities where that’s absolutely the case, like New York or Los Angeles.
All your novels explore different forms of intimacy, particularly male intimacy and the ways in which men perceive and come to terms with one another – could you talk a little bit about that?
Yes, so I’m always interested in the ways in which pleasure surfaces for a character, and the ways in which they’ve been taught that pleasure can exist in the relationship, whether formally or informally, as well as what they actually view as pleasure, and what actually brings them pleasure. It felt particularly significant in Family Meal because two or three of the protagonists are men for whom the models of what pleasure looks like, or the models of the sort of sexual relationships they would feel most taken by or most comfortable with, aren’t visible or aren’t present for them. So, they find themselves having to scope out and stake out what that means for them as individuals on their own. That’s really fascinating to me because it feels very true to life.
So many folks, particularly folks coming from queer communities, don’t have set archetypes or set models that apply directly to them, which isn’t to say that any model can be directly superimposed onto anyone’s trajectory, but it’s really exacerbated for queer folks because of the lack of visibility and flexibility and possibility within the visibility that is there. Much of the visibility that is there is quite static, so to give these characters the chance to make mistakes and have the benefit of the doubt to change their mind about things felt really important to me – especially in terms of what intimacy can mean for them, and the ways this can change over time depending on who they’re told they need to be in lieu of who they feel they actually are.
Both sex and food are presented as forms of human connection between your characters. Could you talk a little bit more about the role you were intending these forms of pleasure to play in Family Meal?
Yes definitely – they feel interrelated in many ways, right? I mean, sex for many people is a need, although not for everyone. And so is food; it’s nourishment, sustenance. So, in one way, they serve as languages that can act as a shorthand for the reader or audience to immediately queue in on and find some sort of attachment to. But food particularly is really only useful to me as a vector to talk about other things: if you’re talking about food, you’re also talking about bodies and the ways in which people relate to their individual bodies or to the bodies around them and how they can change; you’re talking about the socioeconomic circumstances for folks in terms of who can afford what food, who is providing that food, and the many different layers that exist when getting a meal; it’s also a way of having many of those conversations about where you’re from and the type of food that you grew up with and which foods you feel has value – food acts as a language in your community or in your family or in your relationship. Because it’s labour, you know, just to work to put even like a grilled cheese sandwich on the table, so it becomes a means of introducing conversations about labour, about value, and about worth, which makes food really useful for me narratively.
And sex is similar in that way, particularly sex as it is lauded in various queer communities. There aren’t a lot of tangible models for so many folks and, even sex amongst various queer communities is highlighted and scapegoated as being this terrible thing or this dangerous thing. There are many risks associated with it. And some of these things are true, depending on the context in which you find them, but it is also such a source of pleasure; it’s such a necessity for so many folks. It’s also a mirror through which folks can see themselves refracted and reflected, and they can change over time. So, it felt really interesting to me to use that for each of these characters in their various arcs because again, that is also a series of questions that don’t have static answers, which makes both entities really useful narrative devices.
What are your thoughts on the idea that authors should only write what they know? That they should only write from their own lived experience?
I feel pretty strongly that anyone can write anything if they can do it well. The latter half of that statement is the crux for all of this, and in order to ‘do it well’ – that’s going to look different for different people, right? Like I read about Houston, for example, when I write in Houston. I have to do a horrible amount of research in order to even begin to feel comfortable about writing about a community, regardless of whether it’s a community that I belong to. I feel as though I have to spend extensive time in a particular place before I can write about it. So, it requires a good deal of work for me to do that, even in a place where I’ve spent an extensive amount of time. I think the primary component behind thinking, ‘What can I write about?’ is thinking about what I can bring to the narrative? And also, what do I actually want to write about? I’m a big advocate for folks reaching towards the things that are interesting to them – their obsessions and their concerns. It doesn’t belie the amount of work behind it to do it thoughtfully and with precision. And also, with humanity.
How does it make you feel that your work has been taken into so many different people’s hearts, regardless of whether they can identify with the characters’ specific situations?
It’s really gratifying. It’s a really warm feeling. I mean, I think, particularly for me, I was not always a prodigious reader; so much of my early reading was literature in translation from other languages into English, and these are authors that presumably did not have me in mind as a reader. They didn’t have my concerns in mind, they didn’t have my communities in mind, and yet I was able to take great heart in the trajectory of those characters; I was able to feel deeply emotionally invested in what happened in these books and these stories and the places that they led each of their characters. They meant a lot to me, and they changed the arc of my life in a lot of ways. So, it is a really big privilege. I take a lot of gratitude in knowing that the book has gone places I certainly couldn’t have seen it going. But also, that folks who have never been to Houston, or may not spend extensive amounts of time with the communities listed in the book have seen themselves or iterations of themselves or people they know or care about inside them. That has meant a good deal to me.
Do you judge a book by its cover?
Oh, that’s an interesting question. Yeah. I mean, I love a solid cover. The design behind a cover is thoughtful and striking in and of itself, but do I judge a book by its cover? I mean, that’s a funny question because, well, for one thing, the iterations of novels published in the UK have much more visually appealing covers than many of their iterations in the US. And I think is partly because of the ways in which the US market leans really heavily into what they think will sell, which may only be four or five categories, which creates a static economy for what that market may feel is visually appealing. This could be coming from the standpoint of ignorance, but I don’t think the UK market is as wedded to those five or six static design points, and I think there’s greater weight given to a beautiful cover, whatever that may look like for that particular book. So, I will say that, when I’m reading the US iteration of a book, it’s harder to judge a book by its cover just knowing the ways in which that economy could work. But, for other places, I’m always just amazed at the precision and the thoughtfulness behind it.
Although I’ve been very lucky, frankly, that both Riverhead and Atlantic were open to those conversations; it was important for me to be hands on, but I was lucky that my publishers have been willing to have that conversation and engage with me. Quite a lot of folks writing from underrepresented communities are told that a certain cover is going to appeal to who the publisher’s feel the book is written for, which could be really limiting and could really silo out a lot of potential readers as well as isolating what a book is actually about.
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